What is a blog reaction these days?
Traditionally, if there is a chance for setting tradition in the fast moving Internet world, a blog reaction is a counter post on someone blog. This is what that Technorati count as inbound links to calculate blogs’ Authority (and Rank) and Google to calculate PageRank (this is based on my very limited understanding of their algorithm).
Yet, today there are more ways to link and react to blog post:
- Links to blog posts proliferates in services such as Twitter, and Jaiku by others than the blogger who wrote them. Btw, This is a great way to find great reads in real-time. I would argue that it is better to change the general question “what are you doing now?” to “what are your reading, viewing, or listening on the web now?”. In this way you will see more interesting reactions to blog posts than something like “I’m now drinking my morning coffee”.
- Facebook wall and other social networks that allow you to share content.
- Social bookmarking tools like reddit and delicious.
- Digg is some form of blog reaction
- Blog comment
- Instant Messages, and Skype
- To take it to the extreme - someone mentioned a blog post during audio and video recording (beside regular recording there are more ways to get recording done using tools and services like Utterz, ooVoo, QIK).
In each one of the cases above I refer to reaction initiated by someone else than the one who wrote the blogs.
Google will find most of these textual instances but I don’t know if they factor that in their PageRank calculation.
Why do I think that this is important?
First, I think that 140 characters, less the URL string length (use TinyURL.com for squeezing more of your words), is a good enough blog reaction in most cases.
What that I see is that not the blog reactions (very few of them in my case) is what that drives traffic to my web site but most of the services on the list above. Do you see that too?
Is it possible (theoretically) to have none inbound links yet still great traffic?
Does Twitter twits goes under Google’s and Technorati’s radar?
Do you think that it is even more critical in the case of video blogging?
Wouldn’t advertisers need/interested/like to know that?
Your thoughts….
April 4, 2008 at 7:29 am
Question for you.
I’ve got about 10 inbound links to my blog and yet my technorati authority is 1 - how come? Are my links the wrong sort of links?
April 4, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Hi,
Well, I don’t work for Technorati so I can’t answer this question professionally , sorry.
http://ajustlife.com/blog/ is this your blog web address? When I searched this url in Technorati I only found two inbound links.
Also, Technorati checks for the freshness of each of the links and adjust the authority over time (I think that every very few month).
I too have few more inbound links than my authority number is but some are splogs (spam blogs) and some are a little old (no more than 5 month old).
I think that in our case where the numbers are small any single link makes a big difference to the accuracy of the rank and authority and can skew the results significantly.
For blogs with lots of blog reactions and high authority if Technorati did not count a link or two it has negligible effect on the calculations.
Bottom line is that maybe Technorati algorithm is not 100% accurate but in the grand scheme it does the work floating great blog posts and bloggers, it allows you to monitor progress and compare blogs popularity.
I wish you many more inbound links to you your blog…
Keren